Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
57 pages • 1-hour read
Mahmood MamdaniGood Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
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Themes
The Construction and Consequences of the “Good Muslim/Bad Muslim” Binary
The title of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim captures one of Mamdani’s most central arguments: that the post-9/11 world has been structured around a binary opposition between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims.” This binary, propagated by both the US government and radical Islamist groups, has reduced complex political and cultural identities into simplistic moral categories. From the perspective of the US government and much of the US media, “Good Muslims” are those who support US foreign policy and condemn terrorism; “bad Muslims” are those who resist or question US hegemony. Mamdani emphasizes that this framework is politically useful but intellectually and morally bankrupt. It allows governments to demand loyalty from Muslim citizens without granting them the political space to dissent. It conflates cultural or religious identity with political allegiance, thereby justifying the erosion of civil liberties, indefinite detention, and racial profiling. Worse, it delegitimizes criticism of US policies as inherently suspect or subversive. Mamdani argues that Muslim thinkers must be given the same space for political dissent as those of any other religious tradition: “In their preoccupation with political identity and political power, Islamist intellectuals were like other intellectuals, whether religious or not” (59). Religion is always concerned with politics, but only Muslims are expected to support US policy uncritically.
This logic of moral sorting has consequences far beyond America’s borders. Though the Zionist and Islamist political projects oppose one another, Mamdani argues that both were shaped under American patronage, and both use religion to justify political dominance and exclusion. Just as Islamist groups seek to define “true Muslims,” Zionist ideology seeks to define “true Jews,” often at the expense of Indigenous populations (in this case, Palestinians). The “good/bad” dichotomy, then, functions not only to suppress internal dissent but also to structure global politics in aid of the American imperial ambitions. It underpins the selective application of international law, where some states (like Israel) are given a pass on human rights abuses while others (like Iraq) are invaded in a manner which Mamdani believes is blatantly (and perhaps performatively) hypocritical. Mamdani sees this as part of a larger imperial logic in which Western powers construct themselves as moral arbiters, entitled to define “civilization” and “barbarism,” while not adhering to the rules which they themselves set out.
This hypocrisy means that the US government’s distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims ring hollow. During the Iraq-Iran War, Mamdani points out, the American foreign policy apparatus was publicly supporting (and arming) Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran. At the same time, to Iran was selling weapons to Israel, often with the US State Department’s implied consent. In spite of public claims of moral causes, the true aim was cynically self-motivated, as—Mamdani suggests—the US State Department hoped for both sides—Iran and Iraq—to wipe one another out. That the United States would later invade Iraq (and that Israel-Iran tensions would deteriorate into outright hostility) further emphasizes the ironic hollowness of the binary of Good Muslims and Bad Muslims when wielded by the American state. Notions of good and bad are subservient to immediate foreign policy interests. As a result, Mamdani calls for rejecting this binary entirely. He insists on the right to independent political thought, free from the demand to prove loyalty through cultural conformity. A genuine response to terrorism, he argues, must address the grievances that give rise to it—such as political repression, foreign occupation, and economic injustice—rather than scapegoating entire communities based on identity.
Blowback and the Consequences of US Foreign Policy
Blowback describes the unintended, often disastrous consequences of covert or aggressive foreign policies. Mamdani does not use the term specifically, but the concept of blowback is evident in his critical examination of US Cold War and post-9/11 interventions in the Muslim world. In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Mamdani repeatedly shows how American foreign policy has bred instability, nurtured violence, and ultimately undermined US national security. The concept of blowback, coined by the CIA, refers to the unintended consequences of secret foreign operations. Mamdani draws on this idea to explain the rise of militant Islamism as, in part, a direct outcome of US Cold War strategies, noting that as “the result of an alliance gone sour, 9/11 needs to be understood first and foremost as the unfinished business of the Cold War” (13). This is particularly evident in his discussion of the US alliance with Islamic fundamentalists in the Soviet-Afghan War. In a bid to defeat communism, the US partnered with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to fund and arm mujahideen fighters, funneling vast resources through covert channels. These fighters were not selected for their democratic or moderate leanings; rather, they were chosen precisely because of their ideological fervor and willingness to engage in violence. Osama bin Laden, one of the most infamous recipients of this support, becomes a symbol in Mamdani’s narrative, representing the very monster created by American interventionist policy.
Mamdani highlights how, during the Cold War, the US promoted a cultural division between “good” and “bad” Muslims—those who supported US interests and those who did not—a theme that becomes central after 9/11. This binary is closely tied to the idea of blowback. By propping up “good” Muslims, such as anti-Soviet mujahideen or dictatorial allies like Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, the US not only distorted the internal dynamics of Muslim societies but also helped radicalize and militarize religious identities. After the fall of the Soviet Union, these armed networks did not vanish; instead, they turned their weapons and ideology toward new targets, including the West itself. In Mamdani’s framework, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are not rooted in some civilizational clash, as Samuel Huntington or neoconservatives might argue, but represent the logical outcome of decades of imperial meddling. Blowback also appears in Mamdani’s analysis of the Iran-Contra affair, where he connects the covert actions of the Reagan administration to wider consequences both abroad and at home. Oliver North’s illegal arms transfers to Iran and support for the Contras in Nicaragua are part of the same strategic mindset that fueled the Afghan jihad. In both cases, the U.S. bypassed legal oversight, empowered violent non-state actors, and stoked regional conflicts. This pattern of behavior, Mamdani argues, reveals an imperial logic in which the global South is used as a tool for American interests, with little regard for long-term consequences. Blowback from such actions does not only manifest overseas; it also contributes to domestic issues such as the spread of drugs in urban America, a consequence of covert dealings with drug-trafficking rebel groups like the Contras.
By connecting these historical episodes, Mamdani challenges the dominant narrative that blames anti-American terrorism on cultural or religious factors. Instead, he places the responsibility squarely on the architecture of American foreign policy, particularly the neoconservatives of the Reagan and Bush administrations. This reorientation is crucial for understanding the nature of global conflict today. Blowback, in Mamdani’s analysis, is not accidental or unpredictable. It is the inevitable outcome of using covert violence to pursue hegemonic goals. Whether through supporting militant groups in Afghanistan, backing authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, or manipulating regional politics for strategic gain, US actions have generated cycles of violence that continue to reverberate. Mamdani’s critique of blowback is intertwined with his insistence on the need for historical and political context. He rejects the idea that terrorism is born out of a primordial Islamic violence or “hatred of freedom,” as neoconservative rhetoric in the post-9/11 era insisted. Blowback, then, is not just a strategic failure but a moral indictment of the entire system of imperial intervention.
The Political Roots and Uses of Terrorism
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim was first published in 2004, in the wake of America’s response to the 9/11 terror attacks. As a result, Mamdani sympathizes with American’s society’s desire to understand terrorism as a political force, though he disagrees with the responses to the attack and many of the academic justifications for this response that emerged from America in the post-9/11 era. One of Mamdani’s core arguments is that terrorism cannot be understood simply as irrational violence or as a cultural or religious aberration. Rather, terrorism must be examined as a political phenomenon, one rooted in specific historical contexts and often shaped by geopolitical strategies. In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Mamdani lays out his belief that terrorism is not just crime but political violence, often emerging when states or guerrilla groups lose popular support and resort to violence to impose authority.
Mamdani draws a distinction between guerrilla warfare and terrorism, noting that guerrillas tend to operate with political support from civilian populations, while terrorists tend to be politically isolated and thus target civilians to incite fear and chaos. However, this line often blurs, especially when movements lose civilian support or when state actors adopt guerrilla tactics for counterinsurgency. For instance, right-wing terrorist groups in Latin America and Africa targeted civilian leaders, including doctors, teachers, and community organizers, precisely because they formed the backbone of progressive political movements. The choice of targets was determined along explicitly political lines, emphasizing the fundamentally political nature of terrorism.
Mamdani outlines how the Cold War became a training ground for modern terrorism, with the CIA and other Western agencies engaging in covert warfare, supporting right-wing insurgents, and building a global infrastructure for ideological and armed confrontation. Many of the terror attacks that took place in the 1990s, he says, trace their methodology back to the techniques and ideas that were taught to the mujahadeen fighters by Pakistani and American trainers and training manuals during the Afghan-Soviet War. In turn, many of these techniques were originally observed and copied from the American experience in the Vietnam. Mamdani shows how right-wing groups and state forces adapted techniques from leftist guerrilla struggles to use against popular liberation movements. This circulation of tactics across ideological divides demonstrates that terrorism is less about ideology and more about political expediency, as the techniques of terrorism are denuded of political valence. The techniques of terror are politically neutral, even if their deployment is always politically motivated. Thus, for Mamdani, political terror is both learned and instrumental. It is often deployed strategically when conventional political or military strategies fail, and its rise reflects broader failures, such as those of governance, of ideology, or of legitimacy. Mamdani notes that terrorism is not solely the province of non-state actors—indeed, he defines US sanctions in a Iraq as a form of terrorism designed to corrode faith in the Iraqi government by causing mass suffering and death among the Iraqi people: “In reality, [the sanctions] unleashed the mass murder of hundreds of thousands, mainly children, in the full and callous knowledge that the victims were not the target and a cynical acceptance that sanctions so effectively centralized the official export-import trade that it put the surviving population at the mercy of the very regime it claimed to target” (187). Terrorism is violence against civilian populations for political purposes, regardless of the underlying ideology. Understanding terrorism in this light requires moving beyond moral outrage and instead examining the political and historical contexts in which it is born.
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